Tech
Monday, October 17, 2005
Splogs a Growing Problem
Mark Cuban wrote today about how IceRocket (a search engine Cuban is a part of in some fashion) has blocked adding all new Blogspot blogs from being added to it’s blog index due to splogs. Splogs are “spam blogs” that are set up to do nothing but grab search engine traffic, and sometimes links from trackbacks, with either fake information or simply copied posts/articles from somewhere else. There are then text links or other ads on the splog to attempt to make some profit. They’re a waste of time for the end-user, but someone must be clicking, otherwise they wouldn’t do it, right?
I’ve noticed splogs are growing myself, not necessarily from search engine results, but from a few watchlists I have set up for my websites (mostly hockeyfights.com) through IceRocket, Blogdigger and PubSub. Luckily, IceRocket has an exclude feature, which lets me filter out splogs that are just copying my feed and/or the page the feed links to, but in the end they’re still harmful by turning search results into garbage, misleading end-users and possibly committing fraud depending on the advertising being shown.
Friday, July 22, 2005
AIM Fight
If you want to know who’s more popular at this very instant - you or the buddy you’re talking to on AIM, check out AIM Fight.
From the What is AIM Fight? page:
Why Fight?
What can fighting really prove? Using a complicated algorithm, AIM® Fight crawls through the depths of the Internet to answer the all-important question that plagues us all: How popular am I right this second?
How do I win?
Your score is the sum of the current number of people online who have you listed as a buddy, out to three degrees. This means the score is constantly changing, and the winner of the battle will constantly change with it.
“Out to three degrees?” Does this have anything to do with Kevin Bacon?
OK. It sounds a little complicated. But it’s not that bad. Here’s a diagram that makes it much clearer.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Sports Sites Revamp
Both CBS Sportsline and TSN have given their websites redesigns this week.
Sportsline has been given more of tweaking. A bit of a cleaner look overall, I definitely like it and think it’s easier to read. The front of the site has been designed for a 1024x768 layout. The rightside column doesn’t have too much sports-related content though. Mostly promos for CBS Sports TV, CBS News and CBS TV’s nightly schedule. The inside pages have the cleaner headers, but are still designed for 800x600 resolutions, however the expanded layout may still be coming, could just be a staggered rollout.
TSN was given more of a facelift. They also expanded the front page to cater to the 1024x768 audience and now there’s content everywhere. It’s a bit too crowded and even moreso on FireFox compared to IE (especially the menu). I can’t imagine they won’t fix that soon. There’s also a javascript error, but that looks like it’s due to one of their ad scripts. None of the other pages I visited seemed to be redone yet.
ESPN re-did their own site not too long ago, so I would expect it to be at least another year before another change is made.
Fox Sports and Sports Illustrated are still the only major sports sites that still have front pages that have designs catered to people using 800x600 resolution settings.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
ISAPI Rewrite Convert for AllPosters.com PostersFeed
For quite some time I had a posters page on hockeyfights.com as an affiliate of allposters.com (affiliate link).
At first, I created a series of manual links from a text file they had. I downloaded preview images and the info needed, dumped some of it into a db and had a couple of pages.
It became a bit much to keep up with, so I stopped. I took a little piece of code from their affiliate website and just had an iframe that displayed a few top sellers that someone could scroll through. Not really ideal, but no work involved.
Eventually allposters.com released a datafeed. You download a series of files (text, csv or xml) and have all their store information. You can then easily dump it into a database (or use the files as they are if you like) and can build a relatively dynamic store from that. Images and such are all stored on their site and locations/names are referenced in the datafeed files. I wanted to do something with it, but never got around to it.
Semi-recently allposters.com released web services. Web services allow you to access all of their store info on their own machines. No more frequent manual updates. While I know I’d still have to update some code now and then, this was ideal and I wanted to take advantage of this to make a nice looking store front for my users.
Instead of building from the ground up I looked for an already built solution. I found a few ok ones and then I came upon PostersFeed XML by One Click Designs (demo store). It was neat and a good base for me to work with. I also liked that they offered Posters Feed Professional, which is the same script, but with a slight modification for mod_rewrite, allowing you to have cleaner urls (so besides looking nicer, they can be copy and pasted easier, and search engines will follow them easier). mod_rewrite is Apache web server-only. However, Helicon has made an alternative for us IIS users: ISAPI Rewrite. I use it a good deal already. I don’t run Wordpress anymore, but when I did I had a good set of rules that allowed me to do the same url rewrite as Apache users.
So with Posters Feed Professional and ISAPI Rewrite, and a few other conversions to the base script I was able to build a nice hockey posters store for hockeyfights.com. I’m not completely finished with it yet. I will probably add a few more “convenience” links on the right, along with replacing the ad up top with a posters ad (or perhaps a Google Adsense ad). I also plan on having posters come up on actual team and player pages when applicable. This is something that will require a bit more work, but should look pretty good when done (along with hopefully producing some nice conversion rates).
I’d love to post the code for the ISAPI Rewrite modification, but One Click Designs charges for the mod_rewrite tweaks (the base script is free, although they ask you sign up for the affiliate program through them so you would be a child affiliate of theirs at no cost to you). Because the ISAPI Rewrite script isn’t that different from it’s mod_rewrite counterpart I’d basically be giving their script away for free, which is something I obviously shouldn’t do. However, if you look at a few conversions (like the Wordpress one, or a few on Helicon’s forums), it shouldn’t be too hard for you to do the conversion yourself.
Here’s an allposters.com webmaster affiliate link, in case you’re looking to sign up as an allposters.com affiliate yourself.
Tech • Sports • Hockey • 0 Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Pushing Paid Content
If you head over to espn.com right now you’ll see lead stories of baseball streaks and slumps at the beginning of the season.
Out of the five stories contained in the main story area on the front page, four are accessible only to ESPN’s “in” members.
I think paid subscriptions is a good business model for many websites. For some sites it means no advertisements, for others it means premium content (a la espn.com). Either way, you’re usually diversifying revenue sources (generally, it means a site is not relying solely on ads). Slow sports news day or not, pushing your paid service by using the main content area such as this has to be as much of a turn-off to most of the audience as it is a turn-on to new members.
So is having however many new signups worth driving others away? For espn.com, I’d say the answer is most likely yes. Sports sites, and certainly ones like espn.com, can be extremely sticky. News sites in general have large return audiences and sports fans can be rabid. Chances are a one-day (or just a few hour) push to attract new paid members won’t do anything to traffic long-term. Sending some users to alternatives like Sportsline, Fox Sports or Sports Illustrated on a day where little is happening shouldn’t have any impact on tomorrow. However, if ESPN were to continue it’s push for a few consecutive days they might start to see a decline in traffic, at least for a brief period of time.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Bloglines Adds Package Tracking
I pimp Bloglines a good amount already. Now that they’ve added package tracking (UPS, FedEx, and USPS), well, I’ll just keep pimping it. Not only cool, but extremely useful and easy to use.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Nigel’s Blog
Crossing Jordan fans have a blog to add to their feedreaders. Dr. Nigel Townsend (played by Steve Valentine) keeps a blog, aptly named Nigel’s Blog.
There’s more than just a character’s personal entries there. Nigel is posting information about some cases the ME is having trouble solving and comments are on all entries to allow people to post feedback, and theories. NBC is encouraging comments by giving away prizes for people who post information leading to the capture of the killer.
It’s done pretty well, and it’s really the perfect kind of tag-along for this type of show.
It would be nice if they offered an rss feed for updates.
Friday, March 04, 2005
Fried, and Fried Again
For the second time in about two weeks I fried a processor. Both times were exactly the same: I touch my mouse, I feel a huge spark, and my computer freezes and then shuts off. Today was a bigger spark than the last time, and other people actually smelt the burn coming from the computer.
I have no idea why this happens, how I’m so full of static, but I have been grounding myself each and every time I sit down now. I also have a new mouse, just in case. Oh, I also have a headache, but I think that’s due to having to set up my computer - again.
This time I have a completely new model, so I have to slave my hard drive to another machine and hopefully get all the data off of it.
I love a fresh start, but prefer to have my fresh starts more spread out. That and being taken out of the loop for most of a day (when you expect to be in it) really drives you mad.
Friday, February 25, 2005
ESPN Changes Inside Pages
ESPN.com has changed some of the inside pages of their site, as seen here.
It looks pretty good IMO. A nice, clean layout. The biggest difference is the menu move from the left to the top of the page, a la Fox Sports and Sportsline.
When you have a menu with as many options as ESPN.com does, it’s probably a good move. It brings more visibility to the options towards the end, and with the dropdown menus you have more choices available in just one click (by having the submenus available for each sport on all pages).
What’s interesting is that the NHL is #4 on the list when ordering from left to right (same as Sportsline and Fox Sports) - probably a permanent spot (I hope). ESPN generally moved around their menu orders depending on season. I hope they stick with the non-moving menu.
Ordering for those interested:
ESPN - NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL
Sportsline - NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL
Fox Sports - NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL
What a new format like this does, besides being able to give you easier menu access and looking a little better, is that it gives you more screen space to work with for the content itself. They can use the space for anything, including stats, pictures - and possibly some different ad formats.
Besides the articles on the inside, the scores for the NBA are also in the newer format. I’d assume more of the site is expected to change over soon. Perhaps Reemer, ESPN.com employee, can fill us in more.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
AP Feeds Are Here
So I found the AP RSS feeds yesterday from the RSS Compendium Blog.
Tom at the Media Drop wonders about the direction of news on the web:
New way: News came out on the wire, and various news sites / outlets picked it up. You, the blogger, have a subscription to the feed, and your reader automatically snags any article that has to do with a topic that you cover on your blog. You click on the link through the RSS feed, are directed to the AP.org website, and go from there. Blogger Y links to the AP.org website, therefore removing “News Station X” from the equation, readership declines for “News Station X” (as much as can be argued that bloggers deliver traffic), and advertising rates do not increase over time.
Now perhaps I’m being overly simplistic, but consider mass-trafficked blogs such as an Instapundit or a website like Drudge Report. I’m sure MyWay.com or Yahoo! News is more than happy to take the 1,000,000 visitors that Drudge sent them for the article about the three headed love child of some government official. But that might not be the case forever, if this continues as it seems like it could.
He could be right, but it’s certainly jumping ahead. The AP currently offers “only” 17 feeds (not much when you think of the number of topics the AP covers), and it’s only in RSS .92. It’s poorly formatted and it seems like they’re not serving the right header response either (it’s being served as text/plain instead of application/rss+xml or text/xml even).
I’m not so sure any website gets much of a benefit by using the AP feeds from the AP itself instead of using a source like Yahoo, who probably gets the same AP story at just about the same time (and has more categories and is RSS2, although not heavily detailed, there’s still more there); unless they simply don’t want to use Yahoo - but there are alternatives for almost every content topic nowadays.
So it’s a start, but I can’t see how it’ll make an impact until they beef it up some more.
Update: Thanks to rexblog I see the AP is already planning on having tons of feeds based on keywords, and a variety of ways to grab them. There we go, impact territory.